Yellowface, at its core, is not only the practice of applying prosthetics or paint to simulate a crude idea of what "Asians" look like; it is non-Asian bodies (usually white) controlling what it means to be Asian on screen and stage, particularly in lead/major roles.
My intention is not to contest the quality of the films or performances, or to discuss the gray area in any of the casting or films; history was what it was, complicated and reflected back in media in different ways with different motives. Rather, my intent is to...
let the images speak for themselves.. okay, with relevant notes on what was going on in each period, and quotations on the production when I could find them:
Notes:
I know some people would disagree (I've spoken with them), but somehow I really don't think it makes me racist that I don't want to see any of this happen anymore.
Anyway, this is actually all going to go somewhere eventually, but it's a lengthy and multi-faceted point, and I thought it would be more palatable in small chunks like this.
Tied to blackface and the portrayal of African Americans on the stage by whites in the nineteenth century, the term yellowface appears as early as the 1950s to describe the continuation in film of having white actors playing major Asian and Asian American roles and the grouping together of all makeup technologies used to make one look "Asian." Thanks to the power of film executives in casting, Asian and Asian Americans who had decades of theatrical experience in vaudeville were unable to find work or were relegated to stereotypical roles--laundrymen, prostitutes, or servants.
- Krystyn R. Moon
Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850-1920s (page 164)
My intention is not to contest the quality of the films or performances, or to discuss the gray area in any of the casting or films; history was what it was, complicated and reflected back in media in different ways with different motives. Rather, my intent is to...
let the images speak for themselves.. okay, with relevant notes on what was going on in each period, and quotations on the production when I could find them:
Notes:
- This list will include depictions of southern and middle eastern Asian characters as well (more properly considered brownface).
- Note #2:This list will not include films in which knowingly non-Asian characters were, at another point in the movie, made out to "pass" as Asian to other characters. So none of Tom Neil's crazy slant eyes and being "as perfect a Jap as (his surgeons) could turn out in First Yank Into Tokyo (1945). Or Shirley MacLaine in My Geisha (1962). Or Sean Connery with his freaky "Japanese man" eyebrows in You Only Live Twice (1967).
- Sometimes I just couldn't find a picture of the specific character--this is where you'll find a miniscule screencap or nothing at all. You'll have to forgive me for that.
Incidentally, at this time Asian American stars Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong enjoyed top-billing roles (though their choices were often limited to the letcherous villain and the hyper sexual dragon lady, respectively). |
 Madame Butterfly (1915) Mary Pickford as Cho-Cho-San  Broken Blossoms (1919) Richard Barthelmess as Cheng Huan  The Dragon Painter (1919) Edward Peil, Sr. as Kano Indara What sets The Dragon Painter apart is its authenticity of sets, costumes and predominately Japanese cast who are portraying real people and not stereotypes. It is also probable that the same unique racial POV is what obscured this film. The American audiences liked their Asians to be pyschopathic Fu Man Chus or comic laundrymen and cooks. Though popular in the teens, Hayakawa fell into obscurity with a rising tide of anti-immigration laws aimed at Asians and the Japanese in particular in the 1920s. [Source]  The Sheik (1921) Rudolph Valentino as Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan  Mr. Wu (1927) Lon Chaney as Mr.Wu Renee Adoree as Wu Nang Ping |
The stereotype that men and women of Asian descent were incapable of creating complex and subtle characters in film (not to mention their inability to speak English well) was once again recirculated. Many actors who went into film after the decline of vaudeville in the 1930s (such as Lee Tung Foo, Lady Tsen Mei, and Harry Gee Haw) participated in creating those same stereotypes that their work in vaudeville had confounded. [Krystyn R. Moon] |
 The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu Daughter of the Dragon (1929-31) Warner Oland as Fu Manchu It’s no secret that Hollywood simply did not (or could not) feature non-Caucasian actors in anything but stereotypical roles during the Golden Age. African-American actors were Mammies or Stepin Fetchits, Latino-American actors were Mexican bandits or hot-blooded ‘bad’ girls. Asian-Americans fared the worst. Either Caucasian actors stole their roles by having their eyes taped back to make them slanted, or real Asians were cast as pidgin-English speaking houseboys and laundresses, Fu Manchus or Evil Empresses...when they appeared at all. Daughter of the Dragon (1931) is a strange hybrid of Caucasians playing Asians and genuine Asian actors. It features the worst of Hollywood stereotypes but it also featured the beautiful and talented Anna May Wong. [Source]  Charlie Chan Carries On (1931) Charlie Chan at the Circus Charlie Chan in London Charlie Chan in Paris Charlie Chan in Egypt Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935) Warner Oland as Charlie Chan  The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu  The Mask of Fu Manchi (1932) Myrna Loy as Fah Lo See  The Hatchet Man (1932) Edward G. Robinson as Wong Low Get J. Carrol Naish as Sun Yat Ming [Not pictured] Loretta Young as Sun Toya San Dudley Digges as Nog Hong Fah Leslie Fenton as Harry En Hai Edmund Breese as Yu Chang Tully Marshall as Long Sen Yat Makeup artists had noticed that audiences were more likely to reject Western actors in Asian disguise if the faces of actual Asians were in near proximity. Rather than cast the film with all Asian actors, which would have then meant no star names to attract American audiences, studios simply eliminated most of the Asian actors from the cast. [Source]  Shanghai Express (1932) Warner Oland as Henry Chang  The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) Nils Asner as General Yen As the other main character, Capra [the director] didn’t want “a well-known star made up as an Oriental,” but he had no problem with “a not-too-well-known Swedish actor” made up as one. Asther had the “impassive face” and “slightly pedantic” accent that Capra was looking for, so the make-up artist covered his upper eyelids with “skins” and clipped his eyelashes to a third of their normal length, and the wardrobe department decked him out in sumptuous Mandarin robes and a tall black skullcap. The result of these labors, not surprisingly, is a Hollywood stereotype: “On the screen,” Capra enthuses in his memoir, “he looked strange – unfathomable.” [Source]  Mr.Moto film series (1937-39) Peter Lorre as Mr.Moto Actor-turned writer/director Norman Foster, eager to step up the studio ladder, was offered the chance to direct. He objected to Wurtzel's preference for Lorre in the role, hoping to go against the tradition of the time and cast an Asian actor. He was overruled. [Source] |
WWII saw the emergence of more clearly defined ethnic lines of "good" Asians and "bad" Asians on film in response to Japan's role in the Axis. Predictably, Asian Americans actors would spend most of the war years cast as sinister Japanese, often in films now viewed with some embarrassment. Meanwhile, there were still "good Asian" roles being written--they just went to white actors while Asian Americans actors played the villains. |
 Little Tokyo (1942) Harold Huber as Ito Takimura  Dragon Seed (1944) Katherine Hepburn as Jade Tan  China Sky (1945) Anthony Quinn as Chen To  The Chinese Ring through Charlie Chan and the Sky Dragon (1947-49) Roland Winters as Charlie Chan And just for "fun", a quick traipse through the animation world, and the depiction of Asians in propaganda toons (since it is relevant to the idea of "yellowface" in another form).  Popeye: You're a Sap, Mr.Jap (1942)  Disney's Der Fuehrer's Face (1942)  Tokio Jokio (1943)  Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944) |
It was at this time that the term "yellowface" came into circulation. Although makeup and prosthetics were employed with far less frequency by this time, people were taking notice that, in spite of an ever increasing number of Asian Americans in entertainment, many times the lead Asian roles would still go to non-Asian performers. |
 Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1955) Jennifer Jones as Han Suyin  The Conquerer (1956) John Wayne as Genghis Khan  The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) Marlon Brando as Sakini   The King and I (1956) Yul Brynner as King Mongkut (guys, I loved him too; the point of this post isn't to vilify these actors or their performances!) Rita Moreno as Tuptim Poor Rita--she was full Puerto Rican, and couldn't even play a Puerto Rican character on West Side Story without being put in brownface -_-  Sayonara (1957) Ricardo Montalban as Nakamura  The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) Robert Donat and Curt Jurgens as the Mandarin and Colonel Lin |
Exclusionary immigration laws were lifted, anti-miscegenation laws were abolished nationwide, "Orientals" became "Asian Americans". Still, yellowface (and brownface) never dies. |
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) Mickey Rooney as Mr.Yunioshi A performance that really needs to be watched to be believed..  Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Anthony Quinn as Auda ibu Tayi  The 7 Faces of Dr.Lao (1964) Tony Randall as Dr.Lao  The Face of Fu Manchu / The Brides of Fu Manchu / The Vengeance of Fu Manchu / The Blood of Fu Manchu / The Castle of Fu Manchu (1965-69) Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu  The Party (1968) Peter Sellers as Hrundi V. Bakshi  Kung Fu (1972-75) David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine Okay, seriously? couldn't get cast in a KUNG FU character role that HE came up with in the first place for HIMSELF to play. This role and concept originated with Asian-American kung fu legend Bruce Lee, but he was cut from the production, or any credit from the studio, in favor of the then non-martial artist Carradine. (The late) Mako recalls a studio executive's reaction when asked about featuring a non-Asian in the lead of Kung Fu: "I remember one of the vice presidents -- in charge of production, I suppose -- who said, 'If we put a yellow man up on the tube, the audience will turn the switch off in less than five minutes.' " [source] |
Hollywood continues to churn out new variations of old stereotypes for Asian American performers. Oh and yellowface/brownface are still a go. |
 Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981) Peter Ustinov as Charlie Chan  Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) Joel Grey (left) as Chiun  Short Circuit (1986) Fisher Stevens as Ben Jabituya   Miss Saigon (1989-1999) Jonathan Pryce as "The Engineer" a.k.a. Tran Van Dinh Keith Burns as Thuy Though these are theater roles (and I am generally more forgiving of theater casting, as it is based more on the idea of suspending disbelief than film, and now works through colorblind casting in all directions) I decided to include them for the major controversy surrounding it. It is unpictured here, but the way the roles were originally performed was with Pryce and Burns using prosthetics to slant their eyes and bronzing cream to appear "Asian". Although there had been a large, well-publicized international search among Asian actresses to play Kim, there had been no equivalent search for Asian actors to play the major Asian male roles -- specifically, Engineer (Pryce) and Thuy (Keith Burns). [Source] On "Miss Saigon," the producers wanted white actor Jonathan Pryce to play the lead Asian role. But they knew there would be hell to pay if they didn't appear to at least try to find an asian actor to do it. So, they dragged a lot of Asian actors through the door just to say they had, when they had already hired Pryce. [Source] Actor's Equity, the union for performers in the United States, had jurisdiction over whether foreign performers, excluding major stars, could appear in the United States and regulated the portrayal of nonwhite characters, ensuring, for instance, that African American roles were played by African Americans and not whites in blackface. Pryce, however, was performing in yellowface, and with Macintosh threatening that he would not bring Miss Saigon to the United States if Pryce was not allowed to play The Engineer, Actor's Equity permitted Miss Saigon to be performed on Broadway in the same way it had been in London. [Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface]  The 13th Warrior (1997) Antonio Banderas as Ahmad ibn Fadlan |
Asians as extras-in-their-own-country syndrome run rampant in film since a decade before, e.g. Come See the Paradise (1990) Seven Years in Tibet (1997), The Lost Empire (2001), The Last Samurai (2003), Tokyo Drift (2006), The Grudge 1 & 2 (2004 & 2006), etc. With few exceptions, the only Asians to enjoy stardom in Hollywood are foreigners whose claim to fame is kung fu. Meanwhile, secure in the idea of being a post-racial country, yellowface is either considered still funny on its own (also funny: minstrel shows!) or as it was in the '50s, it's just accepted for the hell of it. |
 I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2005) Rob Schneider as Asian Minister  Balls of Fire (2007) Christopher Walken as Feng  Norbit (2007) Eddie Murphy as Mr.Wong  Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) Jake Gyllenhaal as 6th century Persian prince Dastan Gemma Arterton as "exotic Indian princess Tamina" (Guess who the starring people of color DO get to play in this movie? That's right--THE VILLAINS.) |
I know some people would disagree (I've spoken with them), but somehow I really don't think it makes me racist that I don't want to see any of this happen anymore.
Yellowface helps to ensure that top acting roles continue to fall into white hands. Asians and other minorities have become acceptable to see in small roles such as sidekicks, maids, war enemies, etc. It is rare enough that a good script is written that calls for an Asian in a leading role. When these scripts do arise, yellowface makes it acceptable for that role to go to a white person. Producers claimed that audiences didn’t want to look at an Asian lead for so long, or that there weren’t any qualified Asian actors.
- Peter Npstad
Western Visions: Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril
Anyway, this is actually all going to go somewhere eventually, but it's a lengthy and multi-faceted point, and I thought it would be more palatable in small chunks like this.
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Comments
EDIT: Also, I was pretty pissed about Jake being the Prince of Persia. e_e; As for the "exotic" princess, don't forget that there are (or perhaps, more accurately, were) pale people from India, the Aryans. And they were the ones who put themselves in the higher ranks of the caste system, so it's believable for the princess to be Aryan, but I don't know enough about Prince of Persia to know whether or not she's a good pick. I'm not trying to start anything, I'm just saying that historically, it's believable-- but Jake has no damn excuse.
Edited at 2009-01-30 02:47 am (UTC)
Yul Brynner as King Mongkut
Am I bad for thinking he's still fuck-all sexy? >3>
And I think Walken as Feng was supposed to be satirical, rather than a serious depiction of an Asian bad guy? I mean, I don't even remember him having a hint of an accent in what parts of it I saw.
Not arguing with you at all, I'm just curious that he's on the list...
Re: Feng, you know, I REALLY considered this, but it also never seemed clear WHAT the intention of his character was. Was he supposed to be funny BECAUSE he was some kind of weeaboo? Or was he supposed to be funny just because he's Christopher Walken? (I mean, considering how POINTED they were about explaining the purpose of RDJ in blackface in Tropic Thunder...) And I know that not everything should need explaining if it's self-evident, like "yellowface/blackface/brownface is wrong", but considering that TWO out of those three still happen non-ironically today, I don't think a small nod of explanation would be too much to ask for. (tl;dr It's possible, but I'm skeptical.)
I mean, not all these actors did the accent and/or makeup either. John Wayne, for instance, just played John Wayne. As Genghis Khan. The point was, these are non-Asian people playing "Asian" parts, for whatever reasons and whatever methods used.
Then again, the undercurrent of racism (oh, look at the silly brown man making a mess of the pristine white party! how droll) would still be there. Bleh. It was very strange growing up and seeing these 'asian' characters, knowing that they weren't actually Asian and wondering why without getting any answers. It was almost as baffling to me as a young kid as all the colonial epic stories of India.
I'm tremeeendously mad at the Prince of Persia casting. This day and age? My god. NO excuse. None whatsoever! Approximation of skin tone aside, they have such a wide pool of people to chose and yet still they're so convinced that no, no the public (who-- HAHA-- recently chose a black president) would not like the logical casting. God forbid they make a groundbreaking casting choice and blow our tiny minds.
I am so excited to link to this in my next LJ post!! AAAAHHH!!!
I mean, I just.. it seemed like with all the, "Well, sure, why not, suspension of disbelief, that sounds fair Mister Rathbone!" people were just NOT AWARE of this shit! I CANNOT be on board with that. And this is why. (I mean, it would be one thing if this "color-blind" casting thing actually WENT both ways, but it freaking well does NOT unless the PoC can't even be recognized as a PoC.) And then with the continent of Asia being as vast and differently peopled as it is, there's all this MYSTIQUE around it where people in the west have this weird thing where they have NO idea what the people of Asia look like, but they think they know exactly what they look like ("But he doesn't have this color skin, and his eyes don't look like this..") Weird shit man, weird shit.
LINK AWAY! :D
Also LOL @ Ricardo Montalban! I'm picturing him saying something really stereotypically early-movies!Asian in his signature accent. Very osm.
If you're going to get soap boxish about race in films, see: Native Americans in Westerns. IRESTMYCASE. Are you vaguely brown? Shit, we'll use you. This is still the case now; that Twatlight movie is an an example of this.
(Having said that, I was even more in love with Chow Yun Fat as Mongkut in the non-musical Anna and the King...)
The Native Americans get SO fucking shafted in med- well kind of everything, really, it's unbelievable. I'd love to explore the.. I guess they'd probably call it "redface" for indigenous Americans -_- in film sometime, although the purpose of this particular post is actually the first in a series of history lessons, news releases, and behind-the-scenes tidbits leading up to a big thing about the upcoming Shyamlan "Avatar: The Last Airbender" movie.
Next up: Jackson Rathbone (from Twilight, interestingly) says of playing a fantasy!Inuit role when people call him on it that he'll just shave his hair and get a tan, and people should suspend disbelief. (I mean, fuck, at least cutie Taylor Lautner--played Jacob--has some Native genealogy. Odawa and Potawatomi, apparently. If they wanted to bait the Twifans on "Avatar", they shoulda tapped him.)
And John Wayne as Genghis Kahn will have me laughing my ass off for days.
Then however, and this really just proves one of your points, I am seriously ashamed to say that The King and I was my favorite thing ever in the 80s (when it was for some reason marketed as THE classic childrens programm in Germany) and also pretty much all that shaped my ideas about Siam/Thailand as a kid. Which, really, is just sad for various reasons.
(Having said that, I was even more in love with Chow Yun Fat as Mongkut in the non-musical Anna and the King...)
Sometimes I wish that color-blind casting was the cause of Yellowface, but the blatant fact that color seems to be equated with villainy (good enough for villains, but not good enough for the heroes?) makes it highly disturbing...The entertainment industry's rather odd in that though it claims to be geared toward "popular appeal" its actual manifestation is still the white majority..and so the cycle perpetuates.
I know--how interesting that for claims of being "color-blind" with casting in film, it only ever seems to go in one direction XD Unless the PoC really "passes" for white, like scrummy Joaquin Phoenix. (Jessica Alba as Sue Storm was a big exception, with actual whiteface. And.. I really doubt it had anything to do with quality of the performance, somehow.)
If there's a mainstream medium that actually can be said to work with color-blind casting, it's Broadway. There was some ugly political stuff going on with only bothering to make sure the female characters were cast as Asian women, but certainly in recent years they're been pretty good about it I think, with casting BOTH obvious PoC as Anglo characters, as well as Caucasian performers as characters of color. (Though only when race isn't part of the point of the story, ala Ragtime.)
I cringed all the way through.
How the heck can Hollywood still get away with this?
Generally speaking, Asian Americans don't quite have the same support of liberal media as, say, African Americans (for whom representation via blackface would, of course, be simply unthinkable today). Plus, I think Asians have failed to be quite as vocal about it. So of course, when people grumble that folks are "whining way too much about the PoP/Last Airbender thing", the correct response is that THEY ARE NOT DOING IT ENOUGH.
Here is a piece a friend forwarded me from Konch Magazine:
O-Lan, Suzie Wong And Me
A Lifetime of Hollywood Images
By Susanne Lee
Growing up in Hollywood, I spent many hours absorbed by the movies on TV and at revival houses, where along with Greta Garbo, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, I encountered the surreal Asians of the thirties and the forties. They were a limited bunch.
My friends and I agreed villains were the best. Fu Manchu, and other “inscrutables” tortured heroes, sold women into white slavery and plotted world domination. Exaggerated as they were, we found ourselves rooting for them over the long-suffering peasants.
We couldn't resist mimicking the inane “Chinese” accents and mannered speech of O-Lan and Wang Lung, nobly battling locusts and famine in The Good Earth. Louise Ranier and Paul Muni gave strangely stylized performances that provided ample fodder for our imitations, like the bizarre way Ranier tilted her head as she walked behind her “honorable husband.” Even the patrician Katherine Hepburn appeared in squirm-inducing yellow-face in another Pearl S. Buck adaptation, Dragon Seed, playing a peasant patriot who, by means of her fabulous cheekbones, urged her fellow villagers to resist the Japanese invaders.
World War II movies offered an early twisted history lesson. Japanese soldiers came in two varieties: clownish yet sadistic buck-toothed bespectacled Banzai-screaming bayonet-wielding war-mongers or ice-cold kamikazes eager to die for the Emperor. We found these creations humorous, despite their offensiveness.
Some male characters emerged from the kitchens, battlefields, opium dens and rice paddies, only to support the taped-eyelid White stars, such as Peter Lorre’s idiosyncratic detective Mr. Moto. Charlie Chan’s sons were refreshing and believable because they were played by real Chinese. Chan’s Americanized Number One Son, the ubiquitous Keye Luke, was a counterpoint to the artifice of Warner Oland’s avuncular detective.
Impersonators would always get the best roles. Two Hollywood legends, D.W. Griffith in Broken Blossoms (1919) and Frank Capra in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), tackled the extraordinary theme of interracial sex. In these films, Lillian Gish and Barbara Stanwyck played women who defied social convention by seeking love from Chinese men.
Ironically, the Chinese men are played by Caucasian actors in yellow face. In Broken Blossoms, the Chinese merchant who rescues Gish from her abusive father finds himself falling for her, and is so disturbed by the prospect that he commits suicide. The title character of General Yen, as played by Nils Asther, is atypically complex for the era. Alternately cruel and kind, Yen struggles with his attraction to missionary Megan Davis and betrayal by one of his inner circle as his world collapses. The idea of such liaisons is so troubling that the only logical conclusion is the same: for the crime of daring to love outside their race, the Chinese men must die by their own hand.
The Dragon Lady, a mysterious seductress who led innumerable B-movie heroes astray, was exquisitely beautiful but ultimately an alien, resembling no one I ever knew. A teenager could hardly aspire to be a seductive, mysterious, silk-clad siren like Anna May Wong.
Usually cast for looks as a Dragon Lady, slave girl or dancer, Wong made a departure as Marlene Dietrich’s friend Hui Feng in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express. Playing this powerful sexual figure, who redeems herself heroically during the turbulent times of warlords, Wong strikes a blow against the usual Asian roles. The iconic image of Wong together with Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl in their slinky late-20s gowns gazing directly at the viewer remains etched in my mind.
I also want to ask a question: Does this count for Pacific Indigenous actors playing Asiatic peoples in Hollywood? There seems to be a pattern of Maori/some Islander actors from my Oceania region of the world getting gigs in Hollywood a lot of the time as everything but their native people, mostly roles of Middle Eastern people. For example, Cliff Curtis (NZ Maori actor) was Amir Abdulah in Three Kings.
Honestly, I know so little about the aforementioned region that I wouldn't know where to BEGIN with that one. (Which sounds like a cop out, but I'd feel very uncomfortable giving it a definite yes or no or a condition when I have such a lack of knowledge.) But then I've also been known, in cases of extremes, to say that I'd accept ANY halfway believable PoC in another PoC role if the sole alternative is an Anglo with the bronzer. Not because the one is SO much more believable than the other; it's more a political thing.
I will never forgive those bastards for what they did to poor Bruce Lee. I love that man.
1. The Prince of Persia casting apparently has even the football playing fanboys up in arms. They were expecting someone who looked at least vaguely Persian. Living in SoCal (which has a HIGH Jewish Persian population) I can say one thing: Persian Jew still does not equal Jake Gyllenhal
2. Don't forget The Message, a 1977 movie about the origins of Islam. Seriously hard to find any brown folks.
3. I agree with you on Yul Brenner. I mean he is part Mongolian, but that role was total yellowface.
4. Dorthy Dandridge was set to play Tuptim originally. She turned it down because the studios wouldn't pay her enough. I only mentioned this because it was a piece of random trivia.
Interesting, my impression of the, er, football playing fanboys (just going off comments I was seeing online and, eck, IMDB) was, "HEY whatever, as long as he's buff. And so what if he's not Persian! They only have to be accurate to real life if they say it's 'based on a true story' at the beginning of the movie or something!"
for some inane reason blackface wasn't okay, but yellowface was
RRRRRGGGG I CAN'T STAND THAT. Okay, obviously, some of the examples above aren't quite the equivalent of blackface, in the sense that it was used to degrade and mock black people for just existing. A lot of these were basically dressing up Caucasians (and on a couple of occasions, other non-Asian PoC) and asking the audience to believe they were still looking at an Asian person. But dude, that doesn't make it unobjectionable.
I think, a lot of times, Americans have trouble parsing the discussion on race in our country if it isn't a black/white dichotomy. And I feel bad piggybacking on the black movement, but sometimes you just HAVE to say something like, "Okay, so if this were set in Africa instead of Asia..." to make someone especially thick get it.
Also, while I knew about some of the worst examples of this, like The Good Earth and the oh so charming Fu Manchu movies, John Wayne as Ghengis Khan is a new low. And I can still remember my younger sister's horror when she watched some WWII-era movie wherein all the Japanese characters were played by Italians (it was especially painful coming after Tore Tora Tora, where actual Japanese actors play all the Japanese characters, and their scenes are done entirely in japanese, with subtitles - it was a joint Japanese/America production, which explains the sadly unusual lack of racist casting).
With Lawrence of Arabia, the sad thing is that, despite casting Anthony Quinn in brownface (also Alec Guinness as Prince Feisal), the film is actually somewhat progressive for having their main Arabic character played by Omar Sharif, instead of yet another white guy in makeup.
Rudolph Valantino in The Sheik, though, actually *isn't* brownface. The Big Dramatic Plot Twist at the end of EM Hall's book was the discovery that Ahmed Ben Hassan, previously assumed to be the son of an English mother and an Arabic father, is actually 100% English and the offspring of his mother's first marriage (she married Hassan while pregnant with Ahmed). This makes it Totally Okay for the (white) heroine to marry him, because the scary, scary spector of icky miscegenation is banished. That was the point where I finally snapped and threw the book across the room, because coming on top of 200+ pages of the initially not "properly" feminine herione getting raped into gender-appropriate behavior and falling in love with her rapist, "look, it's totally okay to marry your rapist now because he's actually been white all along" was the last straw.
I hear John Wayne's was especially hilarious because he was basically just... playing John Wayne. As Genghis Khan. This Kazakh woman is for him and his blood says 'Take her.' Yep.
You know, I actually hear that with a number of these films pre-'40s, they were pretty progressive for their time. Like, the ones that didn't portray the [Asian] character as a villainous rapist.
Oh wow, I didn't know that about "The Sheik"! All I saw was like, Valentino's interviews where he was all, "I wanted to bring a dignity to this character, because they have a very old and admirable culture, and they're not savages.." I'm unsure of the brownface-state of this movie now. I mean, obviously it turned out that the character was Anglo, but what might it say that not only the characters in the story, but we (the audience) were supposed to believe, to a point, that this character was Arabic? Having said that, OMFG THERE ARE TOO MANY THINGS WRONG WITH THE GENDER POLITICS ON THE SOURCE MATERIAL, on top of EVERYTHING else D:
Also, WTF, Jake Gyllenhaal.
Also also, this was an awesome post. I'm just tongue-tied by the awful idiocy of this.